Screencasts of my favorite Alfresco 4.2 Community Edition features

I wrote up a list of some of my favorite new features in Alfresco 4.2 Community Edition in this blog post over at socialcontent.com. But I saved the best stuff for you, my loyal ecmarchitect.com reader: Screencasts showing those favorite features in action! Don’t worry, these are short and to the point. Hopefully just enough of a taste of each feature to get you to download Alfresco 4.2 Community Edition and try it out for yourself.

So without further ado, here are screencasts of my favorite new features in 4.2 Community (be sure to switch to full screen to enjoy their HD splendor)…

The new and improved Google Docs integration is very cool. I have a feeling this is going to be popular.

And how about that new Rich Media Gallery view in the document library? This is just one of multiple new document library views coming down the pike if I’m not mistaken. You can use the same extension points Ray used to create your own custom document library views.

There are a few new dashlets (Saved Search, Site Search, My Discussions) and some enhancements to existing dashlets (Image Preview, My Tasks).

Here’s one I’ve heard requested multiple times: Can I select multiple documents and download them as a zip? Boom. It’s in there. Another new document action is “Quick Share” which Alfresco in the Cloud users have been enjoying for some time. Now it’s available on-premise.

All of these screencasts were based on an October 8 nightly build using the binary installer. There may be some differences between what is shown here and what is in the final release.

So there you go folks. Download the new Community Edition release, try it out, and give us your feedback. I believe the plan is to have at least one more Community Edition release before DevCon. So you should definitely make it a point to try it out before you show up in Berlin or San Jose in November. That way you can slap these Engineers on the back for all of the great work they’ve put into this release!

Yes, RM 2.0 will run on Alfresco 4.2. The RM releases are now de-coupled from the Alfresco releases. We should see RM 2.0 for Alfresco 4.2.b Community Edition very soon. It will be added to the download page when it is ready.

You might be able to use one of the out-of-the-box dashlets to show a YouTube video on your Share dashboard. If not, that would be a straightforward customization. Someone may have already done this and listed it on http://addons.alfresco.com so you should check there.

I installed the latest version but I can not use right integration with Google Docs. When I try to access Google Docs on my network that has a firewall active does not work, gives error in creating the document, but if I try to do without using the network operates. Any idea what I can do in firewall or proxy to work right? The Alfresco server already has access to all the internet still does not work …..

I’m tearing my hair out trying to figure out if I have to install WQS to get WCM functionality. The installer definitely doesn’t show WCM as a feature in the details section (it lists document mgmt, collaboration mgmt, image mgmt when you see the component details for “Alfresco”).

I’ve installed WQS, but I still see no “Web Projects” or “Web Forms” space in the menu.

Sorry that you are having a hard time. You are mentioning “Web Projects” and “Web Forms” but those are UI items from an old WCM product that is no longer included in the download for Alfresco. You may see this product referred to as “AVM-based WCM” or just “the AVM” (read more about its end-of-life here). We’ve tried to flag all occurrences of that product on the wiki as being something that is no longer included in the download or being actively developed. If you saw that reference somewhere online and missed the flag, let me know so I can update the reference.

As you mentioned, there is something called Web Quick Start (WQS), which, as the name implies, is a starter application that shows one way to build a web site on top of Alfresco. If you install Alfresco 4.2 using the binary installer, Web Quick Start is an optional install. I cannot recall whether or not it is installed by default, but I believe it is. If you do not have it installed, you can download it from the optional install file list.

Once installed, you need to create a new Share site. Then, go into the new Share site’s dashboard, configure the dashboard, and add the Web Quick Start dashlet to the dashboard. You can then use that dashlet to import a default web site to work with as a starting point. These steps are documented here.

Yes, the file system transfer receiver is used to move content from the repo to a static file system. You can also use the transfer/replication service to move content between Alfresco servers if you need to do that.

Hi Jeff, I want to create a php or jsp (or whatever) web page with links and buttons and call Alfresco functionalities from events or somewhat like it. A bought the “Alfresco Developer Guide” book, but I did not find how to do it. Is it possible? I don’t want create a web site from Alfresco, but create a web site and “call” from it, the Alfresco functionalities. Could you give a hint? Thanks a lot. Bona.

Yes, you can create your own separate web app using PHP, JSP, or whatever technology you prefer and then make remote calls into Alfresco. The preferred API for doing this is called CMIS. You can get a CMIS library for Java, Python, PHP, .NET, Objective-C, and Android at http://chemistry.apache.org.

There may be some functionality that is not covered by CMIS. In that case, the next best option is to call custom web scripts from your application. The web script framework provides a REST API into Alfresco that you can extend. You’ll find a chapter on web scripts in that book, or take a look at the web scripts tutorial on this page: http://ecmarchitect.com/alfresco-developer-series.